WP7 Raw Deal for Non-US applications

WP7 Marketplace ratings – Raw deal for non-US applications

Are non-US applications getting a raw deal in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace?

Update 14-Dec-2010: Bing support staff sent an email saying they have a fix to ‘keyword’ search which should be rolled out later this week… It now looks like for the UK (en-GB) it is working with 3000 top apps. The keyword search appears fixed so all apps should now be searchable. So we are left with fr-FR, de-DE etc. ratings not showing. Some progress!

Absolutely! After using Europe as the ‘Guinea pigs’ in the Windows Phone 7 rollout saga Microsoft has left European WP7 developers out in the cold.

Mostly to blame is ‘Bing Visual Search’ (deservedly). Why call it ‘Search’ when it is impossible to ever find 1000 of the apps that are in the marketplace. As for ‘premier search engine’, this part certainly is woefully short of that. This is no search at all, any new apps have a brief day in the limelight, if lucky, before they sink to the depths of the marketplace. #bad => restriction to top 3000 apps in the USA ratings…

You may think, so what! My German, French, etc… users love my app and my ratings prove it. You could have lots of downloads and 5-star ratings and Bing would not care to rank you in the top 3000 apps, yeah right, that sucks! But do you believe me, well here is an affected application which is actually quite good, as in the non-USA en-US ratings say so, but Bing gives it 1-star (by 2 users) – this is an absolute joke, I feel for the publisher.

There was a partly working version of Bing Visual Search for the en-GB and de-DE regions but it was withdrawn by Microsoft on 9th December 2010 without notice.
Thanks to Tom Verhoeff for http://wp7reviews.tomverhoeff.com/ ratings page.